


"Oh Come, Be Buried a Second Time Within These Arms..."

by SweetSamOfMine (AudreeJo)



Series: Olivia [9]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Canon-Typical Violence, Episode: s08e03 Heartache, Explicit Language, F/M, Gen, Mild Sexual Content, Sad Sam Winchester, Sexual Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, post purgatory dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-18
Updated: 2014-06-18
Packaged: 2018-02-05 02:59:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1802887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AudreeJo/pseuds/SweetSamOfMine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Liv has been without the Winchesters for over a year --since the week of the explosion at SucroCorp-- but when she runs into them while working a case, the last year of her life is illuminated with new confusion and turmoil.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously I'm expanding part of my original character story. This fic was the first long thing I had written and it was a WIP for months. I never thought I'd even post it, but here we are! It also is a big departure from the fluff I'm used to writing. It's angsty and chopped full of emotional turmoil from all three characters. It takes place during or around 8.03 and it deals with some of dynamics between the boys early on, and then turns more towards just Sam and Liv. It includes a flashback to the week after the explosion in 7.23 from Sam's POV, also.
> 
> Song Pairing Suggestion: Drove Me Wild - Tegan and Sara; Samson - Regina Spektor; I’m Not Your Hero - Tega and Sara; Here With Me - The Killers

Dean pulled at the light jacket around his shoulders to shut out the bursts of cold wind. It was nearly midnight and the darkness just kept getting colder and colder. He couldn’t wait to get back to the Impala and return to the rundown motel across town to finally relax. It had been an incredibly long day of researching, questioning victims and witnesses, and surveillance. In fact, there was so much to do for this case, Dean and Sam had decided to split up earlier in the day to cover more _ground_ .  Like always, Dean took the _ground_ that allowed him to move around town, see people, do things, while Sam stayed back at the motel, pouring over books and squinting into his laptop. 

After trying to track down case files, questioning the coroner (who wasn’t buying Dean’s facade), and seeking out family members of victims --requiring him to slightly alter his attire for each job, which he hated-- Dean was beat. The last thing on his agenda for the day was to get back to the Medical Examiner’s Office. He had to break in the back so he could get some of the paperwork he wasn’t able to attain earlier in the day and he obviously had to do it when everyone had gone home for the night. Dean had struck out with the coroner the first time he interviewed him, just after lunch, because of a few flubbed lines and the fact that the man had been suspicious of Dean from the get go. As cute as Dean is, his charm didn’t seem to work on the 80something-year-old bastard who seemingly had sat on one of his examining tools prior to Dean’s arrival... Because he was sure that by now the Impala had been seen all over town, Dean made sure to park it blocks away from the Examiner’s Office and walk the rest of the way. When the breaking in part was done, he just focused on keeping out the wind and getting back to the car.

The street lights burned a sort of sick, greenish color as Dean made his way through the abandoned streets towards the parking lot where the Impala sat waiting for him, and while Dean didn’t get scared by things as simple as eerie lighting, it did heighten his senses. His entire existence was proof that anything that seemed creepy like a horror movie could potentially turn into a horror movie. He lengthened his stride as he thought of the warmth of the motel room, a chair he could rest in, and a beer that hopefully Sam had left for him to drink. As he turned a corner and started heading down a darker street, Dean checked the inside of his jacket to make sure the report he had made copies of and snuck out with, after re-filing the original of course, were still tucked there, safely. They were.

In between the thud of his feet hitting the pavement, Dean thought he heard someone shuffling behind him. In fact, he had thought he felt a second presence since he left the Impala to go to the Examiner’s Office, but he had been so focused on getting these errands done (it was moments like this that he noted how odd the “errands” were for his job), he hadn’t paid it any mind. But now he was very clearly alone in what seemed to be the emptiest part of downtown late in the night, far from the trunk of his car where the most helpful weapons he favored lied, so now the presence he sensed seemed a lot more pressing. Unluckily for his follower, this actually excited Dean rather than making him fearful. He would have never admitted it, but part of him missed the nonstop action of Purgatory. This stalker was creating the perfect opportunity for Dean to let out some of the aggression he missed, not to mention unleash some of the bitterness he had been harboring towards Sam.

Instinctually, Dean began to walk more softly. Whoever or whatever was following him was good at being discreet, but it didn’t matter. Dean’s senses were incredibly capable, and it was nearly impossible for him to be snuck up on once he became attune to a situation. He decided to start leading his company astray, taking his stalker down an isolated alleyway. Most of this alley was dark, cut off from the street lamps from the main road, but there was just enough light creeping in at the end of the way that he knew if he could turn back to catch a glimpse, there was a chance he could catch his guest off guard. Dean stopped right in the middle of the alley and turned, waiting, letting the tracker know he knew they were there and he was ready.

From the darkness, someone sprang. He slammed the person --a woman-- against the alley wall with incredible force. A muffled cry escaped her mouth, indicating the wind had been knocked out of her.  Surprised momentarily that he was being attacked by a girl, Dean stepped back. He could barely see her because of the shadows that were cast by the dim, green lighting at the end of the lane. The girl threw holy water in his face, then sprayed him with Borax. Briefly perplexed by this, Dean hesitated, spitting the water from his mouth and rubbing his eyes to keep the cleaning solution from burning. That’s when she landed a punch across Dean’s face, then she pulled a silver knife. Without hesitation, though he thought he felt blood dripping from his nose, Dean grabbed his own knife and charged her, overpowering and pinning her against the wall. The papers he had gone to fetch fell out of his jacket to the dirty pavement. He held his own knife to his stalker’s throat, cutting her a bit in the process.

 _Not a shifter_ , he thought robotically, when he saw the silver didn’t react with her skin. Years of hunting had made him react like this without effort. It was automatic.

Suddenly a wave recognition washed over him and his face went slightly pale. He loosened his grip on her in surprise. “O!?”

She glared at him and jabbed her knife at Dean’s hand, but he dodged the blow. She continued to come at him as he backed away, farther down the alley toward the street lamps. As her face hit the pale light, he knew for sure it was Liv. She charged him again with the silver knife aimed right at his chest, which made him throw her back against the alley wall, pinning the wrist of the hand holding her knife above her head. Dean stared into her face and pleaded with her, “Olivia, it’s me! It’s _me_!” he barked. There were angry tears spilling out of her eyes.  

Dean slammed her hand against the wall causing her to drop the knife. He then let her loose and backed away swiftly, grabbing her knife from the ground and holding it to his skin. He made sure she was making eye contact with him as he cut his own arm. Nothing supernatural happened, his skin didn't react to the silver.

“See?” he said, holding out his arm for her to review. “Me.” Dean watched her face soften into what he thought was distressed woe as she sunk against the brick wall. He was confused because he was sure proving he was really himself would have made her happy but instead it seemed to be making her cry more. He stood agape, not knowing exactly what to say or do next.

The befuddled look on his face was so classically _Dean_ , Liv couldn’t contain herself. She threw herself at him, hugging him tight around the neck. He tensed at her springing toward him but when he realized she wasn’t trying to attack him again, he relaxed and hugged her back, cradling her head protectively with his hand. He tried to hush her, soothingly, but his gruff voice sounded more harsh than he meant it to. That didn’t seem to bother her, though.

“ _Deeeean_ ,” Liv whimpered. She pulled away from the embrace to look at him again and reached up to his face like she couldn’t actually believe he was there if she wasn’t touching him. “Is it really you? You’re alive!” Her tearstained face flashed from concerned back to angry. She raised her voice. “Where the fuck have you been! We thought you were dead!”

Before Dean could respond with anything, Liv threw herself back into his arms and Dean caught her again. He was bewildered and confused about whether or not she was glad to see him or mad at him. He could feel her sobbing against his chest. He pulled her away from him and gripped her firmly by the shoulders.

"Hey, hey, _hey_. It’s me. I’m alive.” He paused to just look at her. Purgatory had benumbed him in nearly every way, but the tears Liv was crying for him cracked his harsh exterior for just a second. She stared back at him expectantly. She looked like she might absolutely burst with questions. Questions Dean was not ready to answer. Questions he may never be ready to answer. All he had to offer her was, “I’ve been …” he trailed off. “Well, I’ve been in the shit. This whole time. But I’m back.”

Liv blinked her tears away and gathered herself back up. “This whole time? What does that mean, how long? The whole last year? Where is ‘the shit,’ and how long have you been… ‘back?’”

"A few weeks. It’s a long story.” _A long story I do not want to go into_. He suddenly remembered the papers which had fallen to the ground, and rushed to see if he could gather them back up. Liv followed him over to the wall where the pages had landed and tried to help locate each one. “Uh...” Dean groaned, half crawling around in the shadows. “S _on of a bitch_ , looks like- Oh! Wait, there’s another one.” Liv rushed to grab the last page Dean was pointing to, before it blew farther down the lane. She returned to Dean and handed the partially muddied piece of paper to him with a grin.

“Sorry,” she chuckled feebly, staring up at him with a meaningful look. It was so odd that ten minutes ago she thought Dean was dead and that this being in front of her was some sort of monster or demon masquerading as a person she loved, using his likeness not only to mock the pain she had felt for the last thirteen months (oh yes, she was taking this personally), but to smear Dean’s reputation with whatever disgusting deeds he was going to perform as Dean. But now she was handing him --the real Dean, the alive Dean, the _not-a-shifter-demon-leviathan-or-something-else-terrifying_ Dean-- a piece of a report that was no doubt part of a case he was working. For a second, it felt like her old life with the Winchesters. That thought tore into her heart for wonderful and terrible reasons. “Dean,” she croaked, shaking herself out of those thoughts. “I have to know more.”

“All you need to know is I’m back.” He hoped that would be enough, but he knew Liv well enough to know there wasn’t enough explanation in him to ever be enough. He sighed. “I should get back to the motel. I can fill you in there." He jerked his head towards the parking lot across the street, signaling for Liv to follow him as he turned to walk that way.

"Wait, back from what? From the _dead_ ?” She wouldn’t budge. She grabbed Dean’s wrist as he made to leave, and tugged him back in place. He let her pull him back into place with an eyeroll. Liv hadn’t seen Dean in an entire year and the whole time she had believed he was dead. Now he was standing in front of her and she wanted answers. If she moved from the spot where she had confirmed that _yes_ this was really Dean --her eyes, for once, were not playing tricks on her-- she felt like it would somehow stop being true.

Dean sighed gruffly as he turned back to her. _No. No questions. Not now._ Or ever if he could help it. “It’s complicated.”

Liv’s eyes narrowed. He could tell he was not going to convince her to do anything until he gave her some answers.

"I was in Purgatory," Dean relented with an annoyed snarl. He watched with satisfaction as her face was overtaken by shock. Liv didn't have to respond because the confusion in her expression did it for her.  "Don't ask how, I still don't know. But basically ... that's where I've been."

"And Cas?"

Dean's face strained, but he recovered quickly. "Yeah. Him, too."

"And-?"

"And he didn't make it out," Dean cut Liv off indignantly, refusing to look directly at her. Concern and pity flooded her face. She reached out to him and squeezed his shoulder, comfortingly. _No_ , he thought as embarrassment and sorrow started to betray him. _No!_ He shrugged her hand off his shoulder with a little too much zeal. It caught her off guard, stinging her. "I don't need you to feel sorry for me," he growled.

Liv could almost physically feel Dean slam shut. She wanted to hear more about what had happened to him over the last year, but she didn't know how she could ask him anything else. She wanted to show Dean that she was sorry for whatever horrors he had encountered, but "pity" was clearly unwanted. It seemed any action she took that would chip into Dean's vulnerability was off limits, even a light squeeze of his shoulder at hearing he had lost his best friend. Whatever had happened to Dean while in Purgatory had only made him more calloused and unreachable than the Dean she knew before.

Dean could tell that he had made Liv uncomfortable, but he wasn't sure how to make it better, so he just tried to end the discussion altogether. "Look, I don't like standing around out here talking about this," he said with finality. "I was gone. It was bad. Now I'm back. There's nothing else to say about it."

Liv nodded stiffly. There was a lot loaded into the that middle sentence _“It was bad"_ and she could clearly see it all over Dean. "Here," she said dejectedly, handing him the bandana she always kept in her pocket. "I think I may have made your nose bleed." She couldn't believe that, after a year of thinking Dean was dead, this is how it went when they were reunited.

" _Er_ , thanks." Dean took the bandana from Liv, awkwardly. "C'mon. Let's get out of here. I'm working a case and Sam is prob-"

“ _Sam_?” All the thoughts Liv was overwhelmed with suddenly went into radio silence.

Dean was out of patience. "Yes, my brother. _Sam_ ," he sneered, turning away from her to force her to follow him to the Impala. He went on sarcastically, "I think you may have met him a few-"

“ _You found Sam?_ ” Her voice was rushed and shrill. She felt like everything she was feeling was about to cut through her very skin and come exploding out of her.

The alarming cadence of her voice made Dean turn back to her with his eyebrow cocked. “ _Found_ him?” he repeated, confused. “Uh, yeah, I guess..?”  Yeah he had found him. It wasn’t even that hard.

Liv was so disoriented from discovering Dean, it had not occurred to her that if this was the real Dean, more than likely Sam wasn’t far away. This terrified her. "I haven’t seen Sam in a year." Her voice cracked as she said this out loud. She couldn’t acknowledge it without flashing back to the night she woke up to an empty bed and a note scrawled out in his slanted handwriting on a page torn from one of his many spirals. She had tried to be understanding, tried to remember that he had lost the most important person in his life, the last remaining family member he had, that he had only just gotten his sanity back when it had happened, and that Sam had every right to leave and go where ever he needed at any time in order to cope with all of that. But no matter how she looked at it, she couldn’t help but feel like he owed her more than what he left her with.

She had searched for him everywhere she could, but it became clear after a while that he did not want to be found. She had spent the last few months finally pulling herself together and accepting that Sam was out of her life, but to do that she had to force herself to think about him as little as possible. And that especially meant not talking about him out loud. “After you died, or whatever the hell happened to you, he left in the middle of the night … I haven’t seen him since.”

Dean’s eyes widened. This was something Sam had not yet told him. He had assumed the two of them had just broken up and Sam had moved on. _Wonder what the hell else he’s keeping from me?_

Liv stood with clenched fists. Every part of her was tensed. A sick satisfaction settled in Dean’s stomach as the bitterness he felt towards Sam flared up, or did it even go away anymore? He wasn’t glad that Liv was feeling pain, but there was something delicious about the fact that Sam had let her down, too.

He tried to make his voice sound as kind as he could. “Well, he’s back at the hotel so-“

" _Take me_ _._ " She sped past Dean toward the parking lot. Startled by the sudden change, he lengthened his stride to catch up to her.

Liv scanned the nearly empty parking lot for the Impala and spotted it quickly. It almost made her emotional to see it again. She paused before she opened the door and got in the front seat, a place she had rarely sat when the three of them had hunted together. That felt like a lifetime ago.

It basically was.

She sank down in the passenger seat with the sickest feeling in her stomach. Dean looked over at her uneasily as he started up the engine, but he did not say a damn word. As gratifying as it was that Sam had abandoned Liv as well as him, the look in Liv’s eyes freaked Dean out.  It was going to be a very long night, but he hoped he could use it to his advantage.

As they drove through town, Liv actually began shaking from the anticipation and dread of seeing Sam again. She had a lot she wanted to ask him and understand, she had a lot of anger and sadness built up that had tormented her over the last year, but also she loved Sam so deeply that it was basically drowning all that other stuff out. As much as she had hated him for disappearing, it was the wish to be in his arms and kiss his face and hear his voice that overwhelmed her ability to fall asleep each night.

She wasn’t sure exactly what her reaction would be upon finally seeing Sam again, but the odds were erring on the side of her vomiting.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A reunion and an argument take place, but maybe not exactly in the way Dean had expected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: I write Post-Purgatory Dean (some might say) harshly, so if you are easily offended by Dean criticism, just be ready.

Dean parked, got out of the car, and started toward the motel door without looking back at Liv. Liv followed close behind him. She wanted to hide behind him the whole time, and just observe Sam without him having to notice her there, but for all the weird stuff, dark magic, and spells she had run into in her life, she never encountered one thing that could make her actually invisible.

After fumbling with the keycard, Dean let himself into the room, allowing Liv to trail in behind him. “I’m back,” he said, gruffly. Sam was sitting in front of his laptop at a desk against the farthest wall with his back to the door. He didn’t turn around right away, but even just seeing his form silhouetted against the dank motel lamp light completely numbed Liv.

"Here’s what I’ve found so far," Sam declared. He stood up and turned towards Dean, not taking his eyes off his notes at first. "According to Mayan mythology, there was this warrior who-" Sam trailed off as he glanced up and saw Liv peeking around from behind Dean. He did a double-take, then exclaimed, " _Livvy_ …!” He tossed the notebook back onto the desk. The color drained from his face, but the expression at seeing her was nothing but elation. He didn’t know whether to go hug her or keep his distance. He stutter-stepped. He wasn’t sure what she’d want him to do, so he fumbled over words instead. “What, how… uh, what are you doing here?" Forming sentences was all of a sudden really difficult.

Liv hesitated for a second because at first she hadn’t actually heard him ask her a question. The numbness had reached all the way into her eardrums and everything sounded --very briefly-- like white noise. As her senses returned (allowing the nausea to be more pronounced), her answer came out rushed and much more shrill than she wanted. " _The job! This... job_ …  er, this hunt.” She took a breath. “The same pattern of deaths that brought you here." Liv cleared her throat, awkwardly. Her mouth had gone completely dry. She tried to reel herself back in as tension began to fill the room. "We’re working the same case, I guess."

“Crazy!” Sam replied with slightly contrived amusement. He smiled wide and nodded at her and she knew that he was trying hard to make her feel at ease, like he didn’t notice how awkward it was. Of course he was trying to accommodate her. That’s what he always did. She had been in front of him for barely sixty seconds and he hadn’t missed a beat. He immediately began to mold and bend to become what she needed, and it made her furious. _Please don’t, Sam,_ she pleaded internally. _Let it be awkward. Please just don’t…_   

The silence hung on the air while they searched for what to say next, but she couldn’t take her eyes off of him. He was so much more beautiful than she had remembered and _she fucking hated him_ for that. Asshole couldn’t have a bad haircut or something? He couldn’t have looked irritated to see her instead of delighted? He couldn't have done something to reinforce the part of her that was angry instead of the part of her that was still in love with him? He had to be polite. He had to be perfectly _Sam_. He had to be everything he had always been that she had missed and nothing new that would help shatter the image of him she clung to for the last year. She was too weak in front of him for her anger to win out. She had wanted to see him for so long and he was standing right in front of her, and even though parts of herself were furious with him, most of her just wanted to drink every nuance of him in. Liv kept searching for something more to say, because she didn’t want to change anything about what was allowing her to be in the same room as Sam.

"I think you’re leaving out a pretty important detail," Dean interjected to end the unbearable silence. "She tried to kill me tonight."

"What?" Sam said, flashing his eyes briefly to Dean. He couldn’t hide the smirk on his face.

“Yep, nearly broke my nose.” Dean placed the cold beer he had just opened on his face to rest it against his nose in an ironic, exaggerated gesture of pain.

"I thought he was … a demon or… I didn’t think it was Dean…" she explained, trying to keep the humor in her voice, but she couldn’t. The air in the room became completely still. Liv continued with idiotic small talk even though all she wanted to do was ask Sam a million questions while screaming at him, while kissing him, while hitting him, while crying. "I came in this morning to look the town over. I saw Dean from behind at the sheriff's office and I totally lost my focus. I trailed him the rest of the day, trying to figure out what the hell I was looking at. And well... here I am."

"It's weird," Dean began, dropping down in a chair at the table next to the door. "If you were trailing me most of the day, you probably would have seen Sam somewhere around..."

Liv’s stomach dropped as a realization struck her, a troubled look flashing across her face. "Honestly…” she mused, distantly. “I thought I _did_ see Sam today..." Her voice became quiet. She still couldn’t take her eyes off Sam. Their eyes were locked on one another in a way that kind of made Dean uncomfortable. "But it didn't occur to me it could have really been him."

"Why..?" Sam breathed, shuffling his feet again. Liv's favorite crinkled brow had made its triumphant return back into her life. If she hadn't been completely overwhelmed, she may have even smiled at seeing it again.

She paused, scared to admit out loud why she had ignored her eyes earlier in the day when she thought she saw him. It broke her rules of not acknowledging how messed up she had been the year before. She knew it would sound stupid, but it was true and she was much too raw, exhausted, and nervous to use her filter so it tumbled from her mouth, regardless. "I ...I always see you. Everywhere."

Without a word, Sam closed the space between himself and Liv in only two long strides and engulfed her in a deep embrace. Instinctually her arms went up around his neck. He held her so tightly and protectively that he picked her up a little. Her feet dangled a few inches above the ground. She held onto him like she would die if she let go, and she was _pretty_ sure she really would. Inadvertently, she gripped his hair in a fist as she buried her face in the crook of his neck. She breathed him in and it took all her willpower not let her lips brush across his jawline.

Just the sight of him coming toward her was too much. Liv was crying before he had even touched her, but now that she was in his arms she could barely stand it. She wanted to feel all of him all around her all at once and never let him go, but also she wanted to push him away and kick him and hurt him and beg him to never touch her again because she was certain she could not survive having to let this embrace end.

 _This_ was what really scared her about being near him again. _I cannot have this again._ _I cannot lose this again._ She pulled away from him suddenly and Sam remembered himself and let her go quickly, stepping back to give her space. Liv hastily mopped up her face.

Dean leaned forward in his chair and rolled his eyes. “Well _that_ was dramatic.” He wasn’t expecting the simultaneous bitchface that he got from both Sam and Liv. The bitterness swelled inside him again. Dean took another swig of beer. “So,” he began gruffly, narrowing his eyes at Sam. “I was in Purgatory, Sam hit a dog, what did _you_ do for the last year, O?” His tone was acidic.

Liv, perplexed, looked from Winchester to Winchester, whose eyes were locked on one another. Sam’s face had hardened into a distressed glare. Something was going on between the boys and it made the hair on the back of Liv’s neck stand on end.

“Hit a dog?” Liv repeated. What was she missing, here? What was Dean baiting Sam into?

“Yeah, it’s a _real_ sad story,” Dean answered with sarcastic enthusiasm, hopping up out of his chair. “Sammy? You wanna fill her in?”

At first Sam seemed to turn completely to stone, that exasperated glare etched onto his face. But then, slowly, he seemed to diminish as though the statue he was had been hollow and started to crumble from the inside. “Is this why you brought her here?” Sam demanded weakly. “To ambush me?”

“Don’t you think she deserves to know?” Dean could barely contain himself.

“This isn’t fair.”

“Yeah life ain’t fair is it, Sammy?”

“To _her_!” Sam pointed to Liv as he raised his voice. “This is not fair to Olivia.”

The brothers were only inches apart.

“Stop!” Liv shouted, half-way stepping in between them. “I’m standing right here.” She watched Dean without blinking. She knew whatever he was trying to reveal was to punish Sam. For what exactly, she didn’t know, though she could guess that Sam and Dean’s reunion probably wasn’t rainbows and butterflies just judging by how her and Dean's reunion had gone. Whatever manipulation Dean was orchestrating here made her sick. She had a million conflicting emotions for Sam at that moment, but one of them was the ability to feel protective of him. She’d rather die than be a pawn in whatever game Dean was playing to torture Sam.

It started dawning on Liv more and more how different Dean was. Earlier in the day she thought he was a shifter or a demon --a monster-- but he wasn’t. He was Dean, but not the Dean she had known. Not completely. There was something _unsettling_ about him. Whatever it was, it seemed to hang on his skin and burn in his eyes. She could see it make its way to the surface for just a second before he would push it back down. It was no wonder she had been convinced he was something else before she ever considered he might actually be Dean.

“What the _hell_ is going on here?” she demanded, flatly. The boys stood silent, both staring at her. Sam looked like he could shatter into a million pieces at any moment while Dean’s expression overflowed with smug satisfaction. The sick feeling in Liv’s stomach grew as neither of the boys offered any answers. “What is your problem, Dean?”

“ _My_ problem?”

“Yes. _Your_ problem.”

Dean’s eyes widened at her. He scoffed. Clearly, he was not expecting to be the one in question right now.

“Well?” she prodded.

“Nothin’,” he answered with big, sardonic smile. “I’m just _peachy_.”

Liv rolled her eyes. "Yeah, Dean, you really seem peachy.” She mimicked his tone. “You don’t seem bitter or _anything_. You seem _completely_ well-adjusted and there is most definitely _nothing_ layered underneath everything you’ve said tonight." Liv punctuated her rant with a desperate, exasperated, "Come on!”

_Please Dean, please..._

Dean’s face tightened the longer Liv went on. “Don’t do that,” he warned in a menacing tone. He shot a fiery glare at her, but instead of intimidating her like he wanted, it just looked like a challenge.

_Okay. Fine._

“There is something you are trying to hide beneath this bullshit, sarcastic --frankly-- _assholery_ front you have going on, Dean. Whatever happened to you in Purgatory-”

“Okay!” Dean shouted, cutting her off and stomping past her toward the motel room door. “I think it’s time to put an end to this little pow wow-”

“Oh, now you want to stop talking?” Liv snorted. Five minutes before, he was trying to drag something out of Sam because it would have benefitted him, but as soon as things turn to him... _Oh, let’s shut it down. Typical._

Sam was out of the circle and it was just Liv and Dean in the ring, now.

“I have better things to do than air out feelings and cry and be emotional.”

"Better things to do? Like what? _Sleep_? It’s nearly 2 o’clock in the morning, Dean! I'm not going anywhere.” Liv was tired, and raw, and angry. She was done playing games with Dean. She was done with his deflection. Did she not deserve some transparency after everything they had all been through? “I haven’t seen or heard from either of you in a year. I thought you were dead. There are a few things I think we need to talk about. And don’t try to pretend you aren’t ending this ‘pow wow’ for any other reason except that it hurts you to think about--”

"Don’t you dare!" Dean commanded. "Don’t pretend you know what hurts me. I’ve got a lot more on my plate than a failed romance! You have no idea what I’ve been through!”

Rage filled Liv's veins. "That’s right! I don’t,” she shot back. “But not talking about it is absolutely the way to deal with it.” Dean’s slight towards what Liv had been through with Sam stung her. With every moment, her face grew more and more fierce.

"You want to talk about it? Okay, here, let me paint you a picture: I got sucked into Purgatory.  Then, you two went off together and sulked for a goddamn year instead of trying to find out where I was! Sam over there not only abandoned me, he abandoned _you_! But you’re sitting here yelling at _me_. How’s that look?” Liv's eyes flashed over to Sam, but he was seemingly checked out, staring at the floor, face twisted in pain like he was trying to retreat deep inside himself to escape what was going on around him.

Liv  knew Dean well enough to know he was trying to shift her indictment and anger from himself to Sam, and it incensed her. She still felt like a tool, and as if that wasn’t infuriating enough, she was a tool being used to hurt Sam. There were many issues she wanted to address with Sam, but not in this way, and especially not at Dean’s urging so he could take sick satisfaction or revenge in the hurt it might cause. She didn’t understand how Dean could so easily throw his brother under the bus, but she refused to let his tactics work.

She latched onto what she could process. He was accusing her of not caring that he had died. No, he was accusing her of actually believing he wasn't dead and still not caring if she found him or not. As the knots in her stomach tightened, she roared, “You are unbelievable, or are you even listening? We thought you were dead. _Dead!_ ”

"Well, sweetheart, sounded to me like you were more torn up about losing your boyfriend than about me ‘dyin.’"

"Are you serious right now?” He shrugged at her shortly, which gave Liv a vision of her fist punching him in the face again. “I lost everything!" she yelled. "You and Sam were everything to me. Yes, you, you moron. Both of you." She jerked her pointer finger between the two of them over and over.

"Then why didn't you look for me?"

"We. Thought. You. Were. DEAD."

"It don’t matter! You find a way!"

" _What way?_ " Liv screamed with an exasperated laugh. "Dealing with demons? Or how about virgin sacrifices? What?” She had said these things to make an impact, but now that the questions were out there, she searched his face wondering if there was an actual answer. His face was stone and nearly unreadable. Liv’s voice softened. “Even if we could work it out, why would we? For all we knew you were --in heaven.”

By the look on his face, clearly this thought had not occurred to Dean before.

“That night, afterward… when we thought--” Liv’s voice caught in her throat. She was blatantly breaking her own rules now. It was the first time she had talked about the night of the explosion since before Sam disappeared and it felt like the words were actually fighting to stay in her mouth. “Sam told me about it, he saw what it was like there, in heaven. How selfish would it have been to jerk you out of that?” Dean had nothing to say to this. His stony exterior had returned and he was unreadable, but his silence gave Liv a slight hope that she may be getting through to him. “Do you ever think about what it feels like not go on, but to be left behind? Have you thought about how that can mess a person up?” Her voice shook. From the corner of her eye, she saw Sam look up at her and she knew her words were a blow to him. She went on, keeping her focus on Dean, or else she knew she’d lose it completely and start crying again. “I am not trying to take away from whatever you’ve been through, really I am not. But have you considered, even one time since you got back, what it was like for me or Sam?”

Clearly, this was the wrong way to take the conversation because Dean was ignited again. “Do I know what it feels like to be left behind? Funny you should ask!” Dean started pacing around the room, making a big show of his answer. “I’ve been left behind plenty. My own brother left me to go join up with a demon -- _which he was sleeping with_ \-- a few years ago. He also left me to be fed on by a vamp while he sat and watched, and -- _oh yeah!_ \-- he left me to rot in Purgatory for the last year. Hate to break it to you, O, but I wasn’t at peace! I wasn’t in Heaven, and nobody double checked their notes to see where I was... So I would say yes, princess. Yes, I know what it feels like to be left behind.” The further Dean went into his tirade, the smaller and smaller Sam seemed to become until he wouldn’t even look up from the ground. You could almost see the guilt physically crushing him. “I have been in Purgatory for the last year. Fighting every damn day and night! Neither of you can understand what that was like.”

The frustration Liv felt was almost suffocating. Clearly logic and sentimentality were going to get Liv nowhere with Dean. He didn't want to hear anything that may help him understand them or temper his bitterness towards them, especially towards Sam. It was a low blow even for Dean, Liv thought, for him to dig so far back into his and his brother's past.

Liv knew about Ruby. Sam had confided in her about that and all the choices he made that ended up leading to the biggest mistake of his life, the thing that he had spent what felt like centuries paying for in the Cage. Sam had done everything in his power to set things right and Liv knew, even if Sam didn’t, that he had made up for it. He didn’t deserve to have that thrown in his face. He didn’t deserve any of this.

Liv took a step toward Dean. This spite Dean was throwing around wasn’t about Sam, and it was barely about Liv. This was all about Dean, his doubt that anyone really loved him, his jealousy toward anyone Sam valued other than his brother, and Dean’s new hardened nature from returning from Purgatory. And even though Liv understood these things, she didn’t care that they were motivating him to be so wretched, because as shit as his life had been, that was no excuse to try to make Sam’s even worse. “Okay, wait a second.” Liv’s voice no longer rang with sarcasm or emotion. Her tone was deathly serious. “We both know Sam has been to Hell and back.”

"Yeah, I’ve been there too," Dean spat with a disgusted smirk. “To save _his_ ass.”

_And now we’re story-topping._

Did he think he was going to shock Liv with this revelation, that he had also been to Hell? Liv and Dean had never discussed it (nor had her and Sam), so perhaps he thought she didn't know and this would shoot some kind of hole in her defense? He didn’t realize, however, that it didn’t shock her. She knew exactly what he was referring to.

She had heard all about it from a few spiteful demons she had met in the last torturous, lonely year. She had thrown herself into hunting once she dragged her broken existence out of the months-long spiral that was caused by losing both the boys so quickly and without warning. The closure she wanted but could not find, the obsession it triggered, the sickening ache it caused could only be tempered by focusing on her job so severely that every other hurtful, unbearable thought or feeling was squeezed out of her mind. But demons don’t care if you are trying to heal from trauma. In fact, they really like it when you’re dealing with shit like that.

So word spread of who the Winchesters' favorite ex-partner was, and eventually any demon Liv came into contact with had another nasty story to tell her about one or both of the boys, be it something they did or something that was done to them, topside or in the pit. They had a multitude of stories to choose from about Dean from both arenas. Whether they thought this would spare them a moment of hesitation before she sent them back to Hell, or would just be a nice last painful emotional scar they could give her before their end, Liv could never tell. But she never let on in front of them that what they told her terrified her or that she even believed them. This made Liv a lot more efficient at exorcising the demons, because the longer they could talk, the harder it was for her to pretend she didn’t care what they said.

On this one job, the demon she was dealing with was more than willing to share Dean’s deepest darkest secrets from his time in Hell. "He made me," the demon had said. "He made me into this. What you're working so hard to destroy, your fucking bunk buddy created." She had never forgotten the twisted grin beneath the glowing red eyes of the demon who told her this. It was one of the many things added to her nightmares in the last year.

In the middle of this screaming match with Dean, those awful memories came rushing back to her with the feelings that originally accompanied them. How could he sit there so smug, lobbing bombs at Sam when he had so much of his own shit to be blamed for? It was so late in the night, she had endured one shock after another, and what should have been one of the happiest reunions of her life had been turned completely upside down by the bile Dean couldn’t help but spew.

"Hell? You’ve been to _Hell_ , huh?” Liv spoke with a slightly manic look in her eye. “I’ve heard," she boomed. "And knocked over the first domino that kicked off the apocalypse, if I remember correctly."

In one sharp movement, Dean stepped straight to her in a rage, getting right up in her face. “Who the hell do you think you are? _Huh_?” His voice was low, but that didn’t make it any less frightening.

She knew he would never hit her, but this was the closest she would ever come to thinking he might. She didn’t flinch, though. His eyes burrow into her and his heavy breathing blew back her hair from her face. Sam stood up quickly, approaching Dean. Liv feigned concerned confusion, "So, it’s ok to point out everybody else’s biggest mistakes in this room, but not yours?"

Dean had the most terrifying look on his face. Liv felt tears stinging her eyes but she would have dropped dead before letting them fall while Dean could see them.  

Without warning, Dean jerked around, away from Liv, and made to storm out, but he didn’t go without turning over a chair on his way. The chair crashed to floor with startling force and the door slamming shook the entire hallway. Liv blanched at the rumble it made. With Dean gone, Liv sank to the bed, covering her mouth with her hand.

She couldn’t believe the night she was having. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liv finally has a chance to ask Sam about the last year which causes him to vividly relive the aftermath of losing Dean.

Sam breathed in deep and came swiftly to sit down next to Liv on the bed as the wall continued to shake from the slamming of the door. He saw that there were tears freely streaming down her face, now. “You probably shouldn’t have said those things,” he said softly.

"I know," she agreed, her voice sounding more raspy than she had expected. "But I couldn’t help it. He shouldn’t have said what he said either." Sam laid a hand on her back, soothingly. He knew what it felt like to have Dean’s fury directed at him, and even if Liv tried to show Dean it didn’t affect her, Sam knew there was no way it hadn’t,

“How did.. you know about that? That he broke the seal?”

“Demons talk. Especially if they know what they have to say can hurt you.” Liv stared forward at the door that had slammed shut so loudly, unblinking. “I heard a lot of things. At first I didn’t believe them. But… after a while, you meet enough of them, they all have the same story…. “ She trailed off. She didn’t want to tell Sam that a few of the demons she met said they were turned into demons by Dean’s own hands. She could never decide if she believed that part of their stories or not, mostly because the idea scared her too much to allow herself to accept it. She’d rather keep it to herself forever than mention it and have anyone confirm that it could be true. This was something she would probably take to her grave.

Though her face was clear of emotion, the tears didn’t stop. She made no move to wipe them away. She was utterly drained.

For all their differences and every petty disagreement they had ever had, Liv loved Dean. She loved him like a brother she had never had, like a brother she thought she never wanted, but she had never told him that before. She was always too proud to let herself say it to him when an opportunity arose because that’s just the way their relationship was. Dean didn’t make it easy to express your feelings to him. He didn’t open doors for moments of vulnerability. He didn’t need her to love him, not _her_. And so there was never a time Liv could bring herself to charge past that wall and tell him anyways. And now it felt like an opportunity would never arise again. How could they go from this point and ever be okay again? Liv was pretty sure there was no way, so she let the tears fall. She had found and lost him all in a few hours, even before she could properly process it all, and he may never know just how much he really meant to her.

Sam and Liv sat in silence for a moment until Sam said, with a twinge of pain in his voice, “I know you were sticking up for me and I appreciate it, but… Dean’s … he’s been through --well, _Hell_ \-- he feels like I really let him down and he’s my brother so--”

"No one” --she cut Sam off abruptly, turning to focus on him for the first time since the end of the argument-- “I don’t care who they are or how mad I am at you, no one is ever allowed to talk that way about you to me." He looked right into her eyes and she could detect a hint of gratitude welling up in his, but overall Sam’s face looked so sad Liv could barely stand it, like he didn’t believe he deserved for her to stick up for him. That glassy, shining stare with the furrowed, crinkled brow, the one Dean had always called his puppy-dog eyes, that fucking look on his face made her want to forget everything about the last year, about the last few hours, about everything else in the world and just comfort him until his eyes never looked that sad again.

And for all the pain she felt at having possibly closed the door for good with Dean, Liv knew there was never any other way for things to have gone down tonight. She would always stand between Sam and whatever she could. She would always choose him, even at her own expense.

_Even if Sam won’t let me._

It was then, as this thought struck her, that she realized she was alone with Sam for the first time in a year. All external boundaries were gone and the only thing keeping her from giving into her overwhelming desire to be near him and to touch him was her own will power. Which, at this point, was a joke.

She lifted her hand to his face absent-mindedly and his went up to hers and held it to his face.  “ _Sam_ ,” fell from her mouth in a whisper, but as soon as it did, her face looked stricken and she pulled her hand back. “Where have you been?” And the tears fell.

His eyes, if it was possible, got even worse and a pang of guilt hit her which just made her angry. She didn’t want to feel her pain and his, too. She wished she had the ability to be just angry with him. It would make this much easier.

“Liv, I’m so sorry.”

“Where did you _go_?”

“I went….” He hesitated. “I didn’t -- _know_ where I was going when I left.”

“You didn’t know?”

“No--”

Liv cut Sam off before he could explain any further by leaving her place beside him on the bed.

_I can’t breath._

Every painful emotion she had felt, everything she had been obsessing over, every question she desperately wanted answers for in the last year came racing to the front of her mind all at once. She could feel the numbing sensations in her arms. They surged up until they hit her chest, the churning in her stomach increasing. Both her hands flew up to either side of her forehead and she tried to take deep breaths. The room didn’t always spin when she had attacks, but when she was sleep deprived and exceptionally upset, it was known to happen. The blank mask she had tried to wear had cracked and she squeezed her eyes closed in despair as panic took her over.

Looking on helplessly, Sam stood promptly but didn’t know if approaching her would make her feel better or worse. No one knew better than Sam what it was like to be triggered, no one knew better than Sam the nonsensical way your body and mind can react to thoughts, feelings, images, or words that were said, even if those things were meant as comfort. And no one had been more attentive to him when he was going through the world’s worst version of that --though Sam is certain a lot of people had it worse-- than Liv had been. So he stood but kept his distance, and softly said her name and assured her that he was there or that he could leave if that’s what she needed.  

She had never had anxiety, not really, not until after she lost the boys. Before she met them she was used to being alone and she actually liked it a lot of the time. Her growing network of hunters from all over the country meant that she may see a familiar face a few times a year, but that wasn’t a guarantee, but she hadn’t needed one. She never depended on anyone other than herself and her car. Her lifestyle was fast and unpredictable. Stability wasn’t her thing. Then she met the Winchesters, two beautiful giants in suits. Everything changed. For the first time since she could remember, she allowed herself to need someone. She needed to learn everything there was to know about how they did the job. She depended on their unparalleled know-how. But more than that, she just _needed_ them. She needed their company. She needed their support. She needed to make them laugh and to laugh with them.

And then she needed Sam. More than she had ever needed anything, she needed him. His uncertain smile, his sadness, his towering height, his pain, his ability to seem small even though he was enormous, the gleam in his eyes, his unshakable compassion, his uncompromising light, his occasional darkness, his absolute _everything_. She was lost in him, she was drowning in him, and she never wanted to be saved from the whirlpool that was her love for Sam. She wanted to never come up for air and remember the life she had before he was part of it.

So when they were both torn from her, she found herself floating in an abyss of dependency she had no clue how to escape. Everything she used to know looked different in the wake of her life with the Winchesters, and the anxiety was one of the smaller consequences of losing herself in them. So as the crushing weight descended on Liv’s chest, she forced her eyes closed and cursed herself silently for ever allowing herself to be this vulnerable to being so destroyed.

After a few minutes and deep breaths, everything began to normalize and the floaty feeling in her head started to subside, though the nausea didn’t seem to be going away. As she felt her body begin to return from the haze, she realized Sam’s hands were bracing her shoulders as she hunched over, and as she opened her eyes his sweet face stared up at her. He was down on one knee in front of her, a lot like she had been the first time she had discovered him in the middle of one of his fits. The memory made her flinch a bit, because his fits were a thousand times worse and he had acquired them for a far less petty reason than -- _What was it Dean called this? Oh, right_ \--  a failed romance.

Anger, sadness, and now shame. What other goodies would this night bring her?

Reading her recoil to be because of how unexpectedly close he was, Sam backed away and sat on the bed again, right in front of her. Liv kind of rocked on the balls of her feet, working up the strength to finally say what she wanted to say.

“So, that night,” she croaked. Her mouth had dried up pretty badly when she thought she might throw up. “Did you just… wake up in the middle of the night and the idea struck you to… go ...? You didn’t wake me up.” Deep breath. “You didn’t.. say goodbye. I woke up and found a note that said” --Sam’s eyes closed and his hand went up in the air like he was asking her to stop-- “ _‘Livvy, I’m putting you in danger. I’m sorry but I can’t stay. Please, don’t look for me. It’s better this way.’_ ” New tears started gathering in her eyes as she finished reciting the note he had left her, but she said the next part with a laugh. “As a particular _‘fuck you’_ to you and your note I want you to know that I most definitely did look for you.”  Bitterness started seeping into her tone. “But I’m shit at tracking --it’s always been my weakness, which you know-- and you tried so hard not to be found so, of course, I never stood a chance.”

She searched his expression for answer, but his eyes were still shut and he seemed miles away.

 

***********************

_It began with flames. He was too young to remember but he knew it began with flames. Everything in his world was surrounded, in one way or another, in flames. And the flames engulfed her, high above him, her gazing down at him in terror, the mother he had never known. The mother he had always loved and longed to be held by, comforted by, encouraged by, adored by, but never got the chance to feel the effects. And the flames wrapped around her until she was covered and then they filled the room and he felt them wash over him and spread ruthlessly throughout the rest of his entire life. The flames burned everything around him, in one way or another._

_It continued with flames. He wasn’t too young to remember, not at all, but he was certainly too young to have to bid goodbye to the love of his life. He had to do it anyways, and the flames engulfed her, too, high above him, her gazing down at him in terror, only this time he felt terror, too. Terror that he would never forget. Terror that would drive his fury on a trail of revenge that would put him back in the life he tried to outrun once. Her blood dripped on his face as the flames took over the room. This was the girl he loved, the girl he wanted to marry, the girl who taught him he had worth just for_ being _, the girl he would have died for, the girl he wished he had died for, the girl he wanted to watch grow into an old woman next to him on a cliched porch with rocking chairs and all that shit. But, once again, he never got to experience those things. This time the flames would take him too, he was sure of it, but they didn’t. Iron hands gripped him and tugged him with brute force from the room, but his eyes never left her, not even when the fire overcame her. As the room shrunk away from him and the last place he saw her face disappeared, the flames went with him and buried themselves in his heart to fuel his fury._

_“Son, would you mind getting me a cup of caffeine?” His father’s last words to him weren’t really meaningful except they meant the end. He didn’t get a real goodbye, he didn’t have a chance to apologize for everything he had ever said that he regretted, he would never have another opportunity to tell his father he loved him. But Sam walked into that room obediently, back from the last job his father ever sent him on, and he had that coffee black ready to hand over to him. It spilled and covered the floor that Sam dropped to next to his dying dad, but there was nothing he could do. There never was. And that cup of caffeine was ruined just like his opportunity to say a proper goodbye, and the guilt and regret is the thing that engulfed him this time._

_She was smart and she was confident and she didn’t think Sam being polite and seemingly shy was weird. She found it charming. She found it adorable. She found a way into Sam’s heart even though it had been blocked off with caution tape for quite some time. She wondered how a man so tall and powerfully made could be so gentle, so cautious, so aware of the space he occupied. He felt her watching him from the corners of her eyes as she tried to make sense of this mystery, but she discovered the answer when he unleashed that controlled passion on her. And when he realized she was still what they hunted, he understood her even more (because wasn’t he a monster, too?)  and it only took a day for her to go from Madison to Maddi. “We can save this girl.”_ I can save this girl. _He can save this girl. They can be saved. “This is the way you can save me. Please. I’m asking you to save me.” It was the last thing he wanted to do in the world, but Sam wiped the tears from his eyes so he could see straight and pulled the gun up, aiming it perfectly. She looked so beautiful._ I can save this girl, _but he walked away from that job knowing that he probably never would be._

_It was a race against time from the moment he’d opened his eyes and knew something was amiss. Knew he’d felt the knife enter his back. Knew he felt the blood run out of his body. Was pretty sure Dean had caught him as he fell to his knees in front of him. Was pretty sure Dean said something about patching him up. And then he knew nothing. Until he opened his eyes again and his brother was hugging him, it wasn’t too long before Sam knew this was a race. He had tried everything he could think of within reason, and even some things outside it. And the pressure to beat the clock was unlike anything he had ever known, but he knew he had to try. He knew there was no going on without his stupid big brother, so as the hour wound down and things looked more than hopeless, it became clearer to Sam the true meaning of failing. Failing was letting your brother die right in front of you, right there in your arms, feeling the blood pour from his body while you do nothing but spill tears over him. He had held Dean as he died one hundred times before, but this time it was real and it was permanent and though Sam clung to Dean like Dean had clung to Sam that night in South Dakota, Sam wouldn’t be able to bring Dean back. Failing was losing this race. Failing was letting your brother die._

_She tasted like smoke and smelled like sulfur though she looked like all his shame and self-hatred incarnate. But Sam had believed that, like him, she was a monster who longed to be redeemed so he put his faith in her and she devoured it. Even though he hated to admit it, part of him loved her, loved the thing she pretended to be, loved what she thought she was, loved the idea that monsters could make good choices and choices are what make you who you are. He had recited that so many times, but his choices took him too far on a path with this girl, Ruby, and even as he held her down so Dean could end her for good, he knew that he should feel shame and he knew he should hate himself. He did and he would forever. He would become very good at both. Especially because when he watched her die, part of him mourned her, part of him cried out, because she had also believed in him even if it was the part of him he hated most. She had never looked at him like Dean was in the habit of looking at him, but watching her die was like watching the trust Dean had left in him expire._

_A bullet went into his head, but it didn’t come out and there were all these medical terms that Sam had to make sure to understand properly so he could repeat them to Dean later because he knew Dean wasn’t going to listen. He knew denial was always Dean’s way, so it was up to Sam to understand. It was always up to Sam to be understanding. But what he didn’t understand was why the best father he’d ever known was lying in a coma and why, once again, he was being robbed of an opportunity to say a proper goodbye. Why was he even considering ‘goodbye,’ while Dean banned even uttering the possibility? Though Sam didn’t know what was real half the time anymore, he knew one thing for sure: if there is a possibility for something bad to happen, more often than not, it_ will _happen. So Sam prepared himself to say goodbye, even if Dean refused, because Sam understood he had to anchor himself in reality even if it was something he wished would never happen. Sam hovered over Bobby’s bed and as he suddenly grabbed Sam’s hand and scribbled a number there, Sam drank those moments in because they may be the last few he had with Bobby, and he was right. “Idjits,” was the last thing the best father he’d ever known said to him before he died, and while it wasn’t a goodbye, Sam understood what it meant._

 _There was sound and then there was no sound and then there was sound again, but what Sam thought he saw was an explosion, then black sludge, then an empty room. There was a disgusting smell he barely noticed and a residue hanging in the air that burned his eyes but what he felt was not physical pain, but the crushing weight of loss and annihilation. He couldn’t see straight, but was it the silt in the air or was it tears that blinded him? Was it the burning smog choking him, or was that just what his throat felt like after an anguished cry?_ No, no, no, no, not again! _And suddenly he was back at that Mystery Spot, holding Dean as he bled out from his gunshot wounds. And he was back on that sidewalk, watching Dean get hit by that truck as they left the diner after breakfast. And he was everywhere in every scenario he’d ever been in where Dean had died, and he relived every single moment of each one all at once right up to the time Dean was ripped to pieces by hell hounds right in front of his eyes. And Sam could do nothing but spill tears over him because he had failed. And he failed again._ No, no, no, no not again! I can’t do this again! _Failing is helplessness, letting your brother die countless times and never being able to stop it._  

 

“Hey! _Hey, hey hey_! Sam! Wake up! Honey, you’re dreaming, again--” Liv’s voice was frantic as she cradled Sam’s head in her arms and shook him gently to wake him from yet another nightmare. A glaze of sweat had formed on his face and it dangled at the ends of the clumps of hair that were matted to his head. He shot up in the bed as he startled out of the dream, wrenching himself out of her grasp. Leaning against the headboard, she watched his bare shoulders shake from ragged breathing and the agony of returning to reality as he buried his head in his hands. She couldn’t imagine his nightmare was much worse than what they were actually going through right now. But then, she didn’t know everything about Sam Winchester. She had stopped asking him what he saw in his dreams the first night. He shot up out of bed the same way twice that night, but he wouldn’t tell her what his nightmare was. He just shook his head and muttered something that sounded like “I don’t want to talk about it,” and she didn’t have the heart to press the issue. She was sure there wasn’t much she could say to temper whatever it was even if she knew.

Liv scooted up behind Sam and slowly wrapped her body around him, her arms cloaked his massive shoulders and she rested one hand on his chest and laced one hand into his hair. Even just sitting up in bed he was so much larger than her that she had to sit up on her knees to lean her head against his, with her mouth right against his ear, her chin resting on his shoulder. She soothingly smoothed his hair down and slowly rocked side to side, whispering phrases like “I _know_ , Sam. I know,” and “You’re not alone. I’m here,” until the tremmoring in his body seemed to settle.

She couldn’t say stuff like “It’s ok, you’re awake now!” or “It’s fine, it’s not real!” like you could usually say to a person waking up from a bad dream. When Sam came back to the waking world, real life was his worst nightmare.

It had been three days since the explosion at SucroCorp. It had been three days since they had lost Dean.

The sweat that covered Sam’s whole body seeped into the T-shirt Liv was wearing, but she didn’t care. She measured the movement of his body with her body to see if his breathing had normalized. She hadn’t even realized that a tear or two of her own had found their way out of her eyes. She had barely had any time to process the loss, herself, so her grief seeped out sporadically and unexpectedly as she constantly tried to cater to Sam. But she knew if Sam had been in a better state, he probably would have told her he was fine, he could handle it, _Y_ _ou need to take care of herself, Liv_. She could almost hear his voice saying those words, but since they had returned to Rufus’ cabin, he had barely actually uttered a thing.

Sam felt Liv clinging to him as the numbness of waking from that nightmare wore off. He felt her kiss his temple in between muttering all the reassurance she could muster into his ear. His heart felt like a boulder and he was much too weak to carry it, but Liv was trying so hard to brace its weight so it might seem a little lighter. Love and gratitude flooded him and he grabbed her hand off his chest and pressed it to his lips. Tears fell as he squeezed his eyes shut, and Liv felt his shoulders shudder again. She shushed him delicately like one might calm a fussy baby. Sam didn’t mind this. No one had ever treated him like he was as precious a baby.

He tugged at her arm signalling for her to come around to the front of his body. She let herself be lead by him so he could embrace her, half cradling her against his chest like a child holding a teddy bear. She let him hold her, of course. It felt nice to be held. She also needed comfort, but she knew that even though she was the one wrapped in his steel arms, this made Sam feel a little safer, too.

After staying in that position for a while, Liv whispered up to him, “You wanna try to go back to sleep?” She knew it couldn’t be later than 3 am. Sam breathed in deeply and nodded silently, his eyes unfocused.

She shifted out of his arms and crawled back to her pillow to lie down. She was utterly exhausted and the lack of sleep only made the grief more suffocating. Sam leaned back against his pillow, but he didn’t lie down. He wasn’t going to sleep again tonight. He wasn’t going to relive those nightmares again. _They aren’t nightmares. They’re memories,_ he thought. But he agreed with himself that for him, they were one in the same. Instead, Sam shifted around until he was settled in around Liv. She cuddled up to him and swiftly crashed while Sam sat silently suffering and refusing to fall asleep.

 

But he did anyway. Light was creeping in the old tattered blinds when Sam realized he must have drifted off. He started out of sleep, heart racing, but he hadn’t had a nightmare this time. He gasped, trying to slow his heart rate, and turned to Liv, who was still sleeping next to him. She looked peaceful, like she was sleeping hard, and Sam knew she needed it. He wasn’t sure what he would have done the last few days without Liv, the shock of losing Dean was overwhelming, but she had dragged him back to this cabin and had tended to him in every way she knew how. He had been too weak to return the support to her, but the least he could do was stay awake to keep from waking her again with his terrified screams.

The light softly drifting in cast different shades of color through Liv’s hair. Sam reached down to caress her cheek, but as he did he froze in horror. She was cold. Like ice.

He flung the sheets back away from her body to discover she was covered in blood from her throat down. She was dead and he had been right next to her.

 

If a cry escaped his mouth, he didn’t hear it. He found himself shooting straight up in bed once again, Liv at his elbow trying to talk him down.

“It’s just a dream! Another dream, Sam!”

His eyes, wide and wild, found Liv’s face and he grabbed her by the shoulders and looked her over from head to foot. He could feel her there, hear her distressed questions, but he still had to look and make sure she wasn’t covered in blood. “Sam, you’re scaring me. What-?” After he examined all of her and concluded that she really hadn’t bled to death as he obliviously laid next to her in bed, he crushed her against his chest. He had relived that same nightmare in the same sequence at least eight times in those first three nights, but that last part was new.

“I’m sorry,” he wheezed in a monotone. “I’m sorry I woke you again.” His wide eyes scanned the room. It looked so similar to the new part of his nightmare it made him sick. He jerked away from the bed and stumbled into the bathroom, leaving Liv watching frightened and confused on the bed.

What stared back at Sam from the bathroom mirror was startling. His face was haggard, cheeks sunken in, and his skin seemed thinner than the last time he had checked his reflection, before Dean had died in what seemed like a completely other lifetime. Dark circles hung under his eyes, his lips were pale, which gave him a look that reminded him of the ghosts he usually rids houses of. Now the stranger staring back him was haunting this cabin, was haunting Liv.

He splashed water on his face over and over again, smoothing his hands back over his hair each time to get it away from his face. He felt overheated. He felt strung out. He felt defeated. It wasn't enough that life was beating Sam but he couldn't even escape it in sleep anymore.

Sam exited the bathroom to find Liv with her head buried in her arms, hugging her knees. When she felt the weight of him sit on the edge of the mattress, she bursted out of that position like he had caught her doing something she shouldn’t be doing. She only allowed herself moments of weakness when Sam couldn’t see her. Liv’s eyes were wide with concern as she crawled over to him. “Sam,” she pleaded. Her voice was auctives lower than usual. “What was that?” Sam shook his head. He wanted to answer, but he couldn’t get the words out. He couldn’t. And she could tell that he was trying but failing to answer her, so again she didn’t press the issue and instead said, “What can I do?”

 _Nothing,_ he thought sadly. _Everything you’re doing is perfect. But nothing._

“You’re doing it,” he whispered, mostly because his voice hadn’t been used much in the last few days and there wasn’t much of it there. He brought his lips to her forehead to try to reassure her, though he knew she could see through him. But he also knew there was nothing he could do differently, either.

Sam could only tell how many days it had really been by the number of unwashed coffee mugs stacked in the sink in Rufus’s kitchen. Liv had used a different one each morning. He assumed she would have just chosen one and washed it out, replacing it in the cabinet she found it in every day if she hadn’t been so preoccupied. But as things were, she had much more pressing things to cater to.

Sam hadn’t had coffee any morning since SucroCorp, even though Liv had offered to make him some with hers. She also offered to run and get him coffee in town if the stuff in the pantry wouldn’t do. She offered to make him at least twelve different meals, or if he preferred, she offered to go get take out at any number of restaurants he might choose. But he had turned all of those offers down. He didn’t want coffee. He didn’t want food. He wanted Dean back, or if he could have done things over again, he wanted to be in the room when the explosion had happened to suffer the same fate as his brother.

It had been all he could think about. That and his nightmares that were actually memories. And now he added the new nightmare. The one he couldn’t decide if it was just a dream or a premonition.

In the late afternoon, Liv dropped a large sandwich on a plate in Sam’s lap as he sat in the old recliner in the living room. It brought him out of the daze he was in, staring at nothing, muddling through his thoughts. He looked up at her standing in front of him with her hands on her hips, an impatient look on her face.

“Look, I’ve been sweet about this for days,” she said. “I’ve tried not to be pushy. But you have to eat, Sam. You have to fucking eat _something_.” The last bit rang like she was begging.

Sam nodded. He owed it to her. Refusing to eat, forcing her to watch him waste away, was selfish at this point. He picked up the sandwich and took a bite. He felt his stomach restrict, his gag reflexes started reacted, but he fought them back. He had overcome worse. He could choke this down for Liv. He wouldn’t let her feel any more helpless than she already did.

Relief washed over Liv’s face. There was nothing worse than standing by and wondering what was going on in his head all day as Sam sat silently grieving, knowing there was nothing she could do even if she knew, watching him stare off into space and disappear like he was trying to erase himself. Just getting him to take a bite felt like an enormous triumph. She marched into the kitchen and grabbed a few other things for Sam, a small stack of crackers, a bottled water, and an apple. She sat them on the arm of the chair. “You don’t have to eat all of this, but… just in case.” She recognized the look of gratitude in his eyes even though he said nothing and did not smile. They both knew he wouldn’t touch any of it.

Sam joined Liv in bed around midnight. She had laid down to take a nap around 6 pm and needed sleep so badly she just kept right on napping. She woke with a start when she felt him pull the sheet over himself.

“Oh,” she mumbled groggily. “You should have woke me up.”

“No,” he returned. “You needed to sleep.”

Tears had dried across Liv’s face so she rubbed them free then looked Sam over to see if there was any change. There was more color in his cheeks and lips, he had showered, and the bags beneath his eyes had gone down a bit, but the empty expression on his face had not changed and he wouldn’t lie down. He just leaned against the headboard instead.

She entertained the thought of asking if he was going to sleep, but she already knew the answer. And it wouldn’t matter if she encouraged him to lie down or not, Sam already knew she wanted him to. And he would do it, but only for her. He simply had no interest in taking care of himself physically in any way for his own sake.

Liv sat up next to him, staring awkwardly at his stone face because this was the fourth night after Dean had died and there was literally nothing more to be said. There were no new comforting words she could think to say, and certainly everything she had already tried had done no good. Sam didn’t need words. He was smart. He had lived through more tragedies than anyone probably ever has ever. Liv knew he didn’t need her empty reassuring words. What could she know about healing and mourning that Sam couldn’t already write a dissertation on?

“I love you,” she said.

Sam’s stone face broke as his brows furrowed over somber eyes. “Come here,” he replied. She obeyed. He wrapped her up in his arms, leaning his cheek on her forehead and he kissed her hair over and over. For every other loss he had lived through there was one very obvious thing missing while he tried to heal from each: someone who would tell him they loved him.

About an hour later Liv was back asleep so Sam laid her gently on her pillow next to him. He covered her lovingly with the sheet, then turned over to rest his head for what he thought was a second. Instead or rest, however, his head got _Mom, Jess, Dad, Madison, Dean, Dean, Dean, Dean a hundred times, Ruby, Bobby, and Dean again._ When he finally wrestled himself out of his dream again, he couldn’t believe he had let himself fall asleep in the first place. He got up to splash water on his face at the bathroom sink to keep himself awake.

Sam made sure to avoid his own reflection. He was horribly tired but he could not endure another nightmare. Unfortunately there was no alternative. He was going to crash out eventually, he knew he couldn’t go on like this. As he turned the faucet off he suddenly thought he smelled smoke. It made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. When he stepped back into the bedroom he saw Liv’s spot totally engulfed in flames. Fear gripped him but part of him knew that this was not real.

_This is not real. This isn’t real. This is my nightmare. This is my nightmare._

Sam jerked awake coming forward away from the headboard with a gasp. The lamp next to Liv’s side of the bed was still on and she still laid steadily sleeping next to him. He hadn’t woken her up this time, thankfully. He checked her carefully, as to let her stay asleep, though he knew she was fine, and when he was satisfied and his heart rate had slowed he put his head in his hands again.

Why did this keep happening? What did it mean? Was she in danger? All good questions but as his mind raced through all the possibilities for why Liv might have joined his nightmares, a memory chipped away at Sam’s brain. It was from the first time, after Dean found out about the two of them, that Liv worked a job separate from the boys.

It had been a week and a half since Sam and Liv had seen each other and the boys were swinging through Delhart to pick her up, like usual. As they parked in the lot of the small cafe where Liv was waiting for them, she appeared next to the Impala like she had been watching for them through the window (which she had). Dean rolled his window down and, with no move to get out of the car, he said with a wink “Hop in. Let’s get this show on the road!”

But instead, Liv circled around to the passenger side and wrenched the door open. Sam blinked up at her as she grabbed his shirt by the collar and yanked him up out of the car and into a big kiss before he was even completely standing. As caught off guard as he was, he didn’t miss a beat. As he raised to his full height he grasped her back and waist firmly, her own hands still pulling his collar down to keep him as close as possible. As they broke their kiss, neither of them let loose of the other, their faces just inches apart.

“Hello, Sam,” Liv crooned, still gripping his collar tightly.

“Hey,” Sam replied, with a smile, his hair slightly ruffled from the ambush.  

She tugged him down into one more kiss and then she was hopping into the back seat of the Impala. If Sam had been a cartoon character, he may have been seeing stars. He hadn’t felt this light (and somewhat stupid) in a long time.

“Was that completely necessary?” Dean groaned, rolling his eyes in the drivers seat. Liv began to answer with her usual snark, but what Sam remembered most was plopping down back in the passenger seat and having a feeling of dread wash over him. He remembered feeling guilty for a few seconds, too.  Then he remembered asking himself, _Am I too happy?_ Was he so unaccustomed to feeling genuine happiness that it freaked him out?

A moment later, the conversation between Dean and Liv got entertaining enough that the passing negativity was overshadowed and forgotten. Forgotten until Sam was lying in bed next to Liv, imagining all the ways she could die because of him.

The answer was yes. He had been too happy. Too happy to realize she deserved better than this. Too happy to walk away before it was too late for her. Too happy to remember that he was broken, that something about him malfunctions and destroys everything around him. Too happy to remember that being happy wasn’t something Sam was supposed to feel.

Sam couldn’t --he wouldn’t-- be the reason this girl was destroyed. He had to do what he could to fix it, now that he realized his mistake. He grabbed a journal that was laying out, an artifact from the life before the explosion, and rapidly scrawled some words out. It was short. Concise. Necessary. He laid it on his pillow then hastily packed what he felt needed to go with him in his luggage.

Before he could go, he stood over Liv for a second, looking her over. He knelt down, hovering just above her face without touching her. Even in sleep her expression exposed her pain and grief, but she was so beautiful in the soft light regardless. Sam actually thought he felt his heart break. He had made his decision to leave in a fever of fear and guilt and hadn’t stopped to think about what it would actually be like to walk out of this room with the full intention of possibly never seeing her again, and now that it was the moment of truth, he wasn’t sure he could do it. He brushed her temple with his lips just for a second, squeezing his eyes shut as he did.

That feeling, that brokenness, that emptiness in his chest at the thought of living without her, that was exactly why he had to go. He had to get her away from whatever it was that was going to slit her throat in her sleep, that was going to light her up and let her burn.

_I have to get her away from me._

“I love you, too,” he whispered. Sam turned on his heels and walked out.

 

******************

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The truth comes out. And it hurts.

Liv stood silently holding her arms across her chest, feeling her heart thump against her hands, waiting for Sam to respond to her question about the note he had left her. Sam seemed to have gone far away when Liv first mentioned the night he left, but when he returned his words seemed to come all at once.

“It had been days and I couldn’t...” He trailed off, turning his eyes to the floor. He took a deep breath and started again, more slowly this time. “It was like waking nightmares. I was lying there in that bedroom every night that week, looking back at my life, reliving every person who had ever meant anything to me falling victim to this... curse that follows me around… I just kept watching each one of them dying on loop and wondering what I could have done to stop it.”

Liv watched him as his eyes got a little glossier, a little wider the longer he continued to explain the thought process that lead him to leave her, like he could see it in real time. She could guess that, like her, Sam had a rule not to think back on the last year (and particularly not that week of the last year) very often. She could also guess that, like her, talking about it out loud was probably especially out of the question.

She remembered those days following Dean’s death so vividly that it made her stomach turn, which is why she never allowed herself to go there. Hearing Sam finally tell her what was going on in his head each night while she sat by, helplessly trying to control the hurricane of grief with an umbrella and rain boots, struck her hard. She suddenly felt new shades of guilt for ever having asked Sam to explain himself.

_Jesus Christ! He had just lost his brother, what is wrong with me?_

He went on, “I decided --I left the life that killed every single member of my family.” He began to refocus again, the glossiness was fading but the pain in his eyes was bolder than ever. “Liv, I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t.” He shook his head at her with finality. “If I had, I would have suffocated. I had to get away from everything that reminded me of hunting and of Dean and pretend it didn't exist in order to survive it. That meant I couldn't even stay for you. And you deserved better than that, and I’ll never make up for that. I’ll never forgive myself for that. But that night --I just had to go. That second.”

He paused and just looked at her for a second to measure how she was taking all of this. He couldn’t tell. She looked just as broken as before, not worse. Was that a good thing? Or..? Maybe she was already as crushed as she could be, so any change would be unnoticeable.

 _Being around me was too painful,_  Liv thought. It’s not like this thought hadn’t occurred to her. After everything Sam had been through it almost felt like the natural next step for him to take, leaving it all behind. If that was the only way for him to deal with the greatest loss of his life, she couldn’t blame him for it. At the same time, she would have liked the opportunity to exit the life with him, if that’s what he had wanted. It hurt all over again for her to remember that’s not what he had wanted.

“I could have helped you,” she said weakly. “If you had told me, I .. I-”

He shook his head. “I was a mess, Olivia!” He couldn’t sit anymore. He was so tall and he didn’t want to seem imposing but he couldn’t stay seated any longer. Having to think back to that night was making him too apprehensive. He had to move around, so he stood. And Liv, knowing Sam would never want to seem threatening, didn’t cower back even though his interjection startled her. Even in turmoil, even after months of not seeing each other, they still were able to shift and bend to each other like clockwork. The gears and cogs spun together like they always had. “It wouldn’t have mattered how much we talked,” he continued in a sweeter tone. “Livvy, you know more about me than anyone except for just a handful of people, and even those people only know what they know because they were there and witnessed a lot of it. I’ve told you more than I think I’ve told anyone. But still, I can’t expect you to understand how I felt that night.”

“The feeling of being broken?”

“The feeling of knowing every time I have ever felt happy or even almost happy, something has gone horribly wrong,” Sam replied, bitterly. “Something about whatever it was that was making me happy turned out to be used against me. It was the feeling that happiness could never be in the cards for me.”

She had made him forget that feeling. She came along and was vibrant and made him feel like he hadn’t felt in years. And he forgot that he was broken, that there was glitch in his make up that causes catastrophes around him, and that he shouldn’t allow himself to be happy. She was so bright and good that she blotted out the red flags that usually warned him to retreat. He ignored them and he pursued happiness again, with Liv, but the night he left he remembered everything about why he had stayed unhappy for so long. It was to protect the people who might get caught up in his glitch.

It was selfish for Sam to try to be happy. He should have remembered that. One way or another, it will always end bad.   

Meandering restlessly as he explained made him end up right in front of her, so close her eyes had to reach straight up in their sockets to stay locked on his face. _He’s so tall._ It kept surprising her.

Sam was miles away again. It matched the distance in his voice. “But happiness was still in the cards for you. That night, going through the loop again, I couldn’t stop focusing on my curse, but it didn’t have to be yours, too. I could still spare you.” Liv felt another tear find its way out of her eye and Sam’s hand came up and wiped it away. “So… I left. Like… right as the thought hit me. I had to get as far away as I could as fast as possible.”

Liv turned her head towards the ground and Sam’s hand fell away from her face. He hated himself for trying to explain to her why he abandoned her. _Yes abandon_ , the voice in his head spat. _Spin it however you like, try to explain that boxing out every thing connected to hunting was the only way you could think to cope, help her see you were doing her a favor but the fact remains you abandoned her._

Liv had survived for years hunting before she met Sam and Dean so he had been convinced she’d be okay if he left. _She’s strong. She’s good at it. She’s resilient._ She lived the life she chose and she found a way to thrive in that world without it consuming her. These were things Sam had always admired in her.  These were things he wanted to preserve in her. A pained smile formed on Sam’s face that looked a little like pride. “I knew you’d eventually be ok. I knew that it would hurt you -- _I am such a shit_ , I’m so sorry the way I left you-- but I knew you’d recover and you’d be ok. I left, I took my demons with me, no pun intended.”

But more than likely the damage had already been done before he ever wrote that note and drove away thinking he still had time to spare her the outcome of all the others. Maybe he had ruined her chances to be happy the first time he shook her hand and introduced himself, the first time he let his touch linger a few extra seconds when they hugged, the first time he grabbed her and kissed her, the first time he believed he could be happy with this girl. Maybe just by being in her life at all he had already ruined it. Maybe it didn’t matter that he tried to spare her because the bomb had already been planted and all he had done by leaving was allowed it to go off while she was alone. _Too little, too late._

“I was that easy to walk away from?”

“Nothing about that night was easy.”

“There was nothing I could do to stop you..?”

“No,” Sam replied faintly, lightly shaking his head. “The last person I saw die in the loop those last two days was you.”

Liv’s eyes widened a bit at hearing this and everything seemed to click into place. It was one of the worst years of Liv’s life, and while she still couldn’t help that she felt pain because Sam chose to go, she understood why he did. Knowing Sam, she _got_ it now. And she understood that after everything he had been through, he had every right to decide how to try to live again. If that didn’t include her, what could she do? How could she place blame on him? How could she demand he stay when if something had happened to her, he would have ultimately blamed himself, another scar on his back from the emotional lashes he constantly seemed to be punishing himself with, but didn’t deserve?

Liv’s hands went up to either side of Sam’s head and gently pulled him down to place his forehead on hers. Sam obediently rested there, lifting his long arms up around her shoulders to pull her closer to him. Liv didn't think this was a great idea, but the relief she felt at finally getting an explanation from Sam made it hard for her to care. She closed her eyes and let herself get absorbed in being that near to him.

“You underestimated how much you matter to me,” she breathed. “You always underestimate how much you matter. In general.” She smoothed back some of Sam’s hair, something she’d wanted to do since she first walked in that room what felt like days ago. She felt Sam subtly lean into her touch. “You left that night because you thought I’d be better off, but you didn’t think of how hard it would be for me to go on without you.”

Sam sighed. “Liv. There’s something else you should know.”

 _Oh God, can I handle much else tonight?_  

Even though she had hoped she could suspend this part as long as possible, Liv knew she was about to find out the real reason Dean was so eager to get her back to the hotel room and what he was trying so hard to get Sam to admit. She really wanted to stay close to Sam, listening to him breathe, feeling his heart thump against his chest, living in a world where they were reunited and nothing else hurtful could come between them. She wanted to just be okay for a goddamn second. But there was also a part of her that kept going back over the conversation from earlier in the night when Dean had said “Don’t you think she deserves to know?” and Sam hadn’t denied it.

She braced herself. If Dean wanted whatever this was to come out, based on the display from earlier, she was sure it could only bring pain.

Sam began by sitting down again. He was about to hurt her and being as small as possible made him feel it might soften the blow just a little. “Before Dean came back,” he began in a low voice, “I moved in with a woman I met at a…”

Liv flinched. _No, no no._ Surely she heard wrong. Liv’s physical reaction made Sam hesitate to go on.

“I’m sorry...you _what_?”

Sam reluctantly started again, slowly. Liv did deserve to know. “I moved in with a woman, a veterinarian, named Amelia. She-”

Liv cocked her head to the side in confusion. (She refused to believe this feeling was disbelief because that would be acknowledging there was something to believe in the first place.) “You moved _in_? Like… you were _living_ with her? Like…. you were _with_ her?”

Sam nodded.

 _“How long?”_   Her voice was really shrill and she didn’t even try to bring it down.

“Not long, just the last few months.”

Liv turned away from him to try and absorb this information while a thousand new questions raced through her brain. She wasn’t sure what she expected, but it certainly wasn’t this. And just when she was sure she had reached her threshold for amount of pain experienced in a single night. Now she was furious and hurt and felt abandoned in a completely new way, and to go along with all those delicious emotions she also felt disgust. Disgust that Sam’s revelation hit her just like Dean had intended, because a bitter part of her wanted to storm out of this hotel room and not look back, leaving Sam to stare after her in her wake, hopefully feeling abandoned, too. And that is no doubt precisely what Dean wanted.

Sam’s shoulders jumped with a start as an aggressive groan that bordered on a scream escaped Liv’s mouth. Everything had been taken from her and even when it had been returned, it was broken or had gone sour.

“Liv?” Sam said, warily.

She jerked around to look at him. He had never been on the receiving end of this glare. It was a look that was only reserved for demons, monsters, and on occasion, Dean. Sam didn’t like it.  _But I deserve it,_ he thought. Of course he deserved all her wrath and more.  

“Her name was _Amelia_?” she asked, squaring up in front of Sam. The question flew from Liv’s mouth like an accusation.

“Yes..”

“And you two had a place?”

“Yes.”

“And you were _together_.”

Sam sighed. “Yes.”

“Until Dean came back?”

“No!” Sam exclaimed with a bit of relief in his voice. “We broke up before Dean showed up. She thought her husband had died in Afghanistan. Turns out she was wrong.”

Liv narrowed her eyes at him. She wasn’t sure if this was supposed to make her feel better or not. She didn’t know what she was supposed to feel at all. Was there a right way to feel? She had given up trying to decide, but she knew what she did feel: sick. And she felt tears brimming over the sides of her eyes. And she couldn’t give less of a fuck anymore.

“So you didn’t _want_ to leave her?”

Sam shook his head slowly, looking at the ground like he was a child being scolded.

Liv’s voice became very small. _“Did you love her?”_ There were so many questions swimming around her brain but no way for her to filter them into sentences that made sense. That was the only one that came out, and as soon as she said it, it was all she could fixate on.

A furrowed brow and glassy eyes was the only response she got from him.

“ _Sam_ ,” she whimpered, desperation growing as he withheld the answer. She started to close the space between them, like being closer to him would make his answer what she wanted to hear. “Did you love her?”

The pained look on Sam’s face did not change.

“ _Sammy_ …” Her voice cracked. She didn’t mean to use that name, but she had and she hated herself for it. She knew when she saw him blanch at hearing it that she was using it strategically. She was torn between feeling awful for adding to his guilt and feeling savagely justified to do so. _You are the worst,_ she told herself. It had been so long since she had said that name out loud and it hurt but felt exhilarating at the same time. She had broken nearly every rule she had made for herself in the last year all in one night. Tears spilled down her face. Why was she asking this?

_You do not want to know this. Don’t make him tell you this. DO NOT MAKE HIM TELL YOU THIS._

Her mind was screaming at her while her heart and body cried out for him.

With every thought and feeling so mixed up and conflicting inside of her, she couldn’t focus on any one thing and she began to feel the overwhelming crushing sensation of another anxiety attack. Then the numbness hit her and the room started spinning. All she could really focus on was Sam’s concerned face as she wavered on her feet.

Liv had somehow gotten so close to Sam that her legs were between his knees. Thinking she might topple, Sam’s hands came up abruptly to brace her. He tilted his head up towards her face, and before she even caught her balance or fully understood why it happened, she grabbed his face and kissed him.

_Well fuck, there goes the rule book._

And though he was surprised and confused about how this came to be, he gave in and kissed her back. It anchored her, the room stood still, and she wanted it to stay that way. She desperately focused on his touch, his lips, his face, and tried frantically to push everything else about that night far, far back to the back of her mind.

Sam pulled back just for a second to search Liv’s face. She answered his concern by silently shaking her head.

_Don’t stop. Come back._

As if he read her thoughts through her eyes, Sam’s hand swiftly went back up, and cradling the back of Liv’s head, he brought her back to his lips, lacing his fingers into her hair, pulling her into into him reassuringly. She clung to him as he tipped over onto his back, falling gently against the bed. As she hovered over him, still enraptured in their kiss, tears from her eyes fell over both their faces. She wasn’t sure if she had stopped crying and these were residual tears or if they just kept coming. She wanted to focus on no other feeling except the feeling of him and erase everything about this night from her mind except this moment.

They rolled over to where they were on their sides. Sam broke the kiss to drag his lips across her jaw and onto her neck, an old habit, an old pattern they had fallen right back into. It was so familiar that Liv closed her eyes to let it take her back to the time before everything was ruined, but she couldn’t ignore the burning heartache that was fighting to consume her. Liv locked her arms around Sam’s neck like he was the only thing keeping her from turning to cinders right there.

“Don’t stop,” she whispered breathlessly. She wanted him to wipe her thoughts completely away. Bring on a haze of emotions that clouds judgment and suspends reality. Keep all thought at bay. She moved her lips just over his ear. “I don’t want you to stop.”

He pulled away from the crook of her neck to scan her face one more time, supporting himself on his elbow as he hovered over her. His brows pulled together in one of the saddest faces Liv had ever seen, but then something set in his eyes, erasing that expression. A second later he eagerly descended upon her.

The energy between them shifted instantly as she began to take his cues. She gripped his collar and pulled him down onto her, arching against him as she started unbuttoning his shirt. His hands traveled down her sides until he got to her thighs and threw her legs around him. She locked them in place. As his hands came back up over her hips, they tore at her shirt, freeing her from it effortlessly.

Everything blurred as she lost herself in Sam. There was panting and sweat and briefly the absence of the heaviness of her pain. Sam knew just how to play her body like an instrument and her body obeyed him at every turn. It was familiar, like second nature. Like they hadn’t been wrenched away from each other for a year where ruinous conditions were allowed to change everything between them. And while she found comfort in the familiarity, it couldn’t last long because even the same was different. Her brain couldn’t be outrun, even if there was a lag, even if she finally gave her heart and body what they wanted.

In the midst of the enjoyable storm that at one time blotted out all the pain and revelation of the rest of the night, images of a woman Liv had never seen made their way into her mind. But she knew who the woman was, and this woman jerked her right back to reality. The first time the lady flashed into her mind it startled her but she tried to focus back on Sam and settle back into the haze of clouded judgment, but the woman was relentless, and pretty soon Liv couldn’t shut her eyes or even feel Sam’s touch without a flash of this lady’s image. Liv started feeling overheated and closterfobic being tangled up with Sam and it was getting hard for her to breathe once more.

Sam felt her start to twist and shuffle out from underneath him so he sat up quickly to free her, a slightly horrified look on his face. Liv pushed away with a sharp cry, turning her back to him as she retreated to the opposite side of the bed. Her bare shoulders trembled as she tried to catch her breath. She sat with her head in her hands. Sam watched her form seem to shrink as she struggled to catch her breath. Even though she was just on the other side of the bed, for as closed off as she had suddenly become, Liv might as well be in another town.

He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply to steady himself. Against his better judgment Sam had let himself touch her, he had let himself kiss her and hold her, he had let himself envelop her like he had so many times in the past. He had wanted to make her feel better, he wanted to patch up her wounds, the wounds he had caused, but he knew it was like putting a bandaid on an exit wound. He so desperately longed to do something to make it better even for a moment, he gave in. Gave into her and his own desires. But of course it ended up here, with her as far from him as she could be and still be on the same bed, disintegrating into tears. There was no other way for this night --if it was to ever occur-- to play out other than this. No matter when, no matter how, whether it was because Dean brought Liv back to play her against him or not. Sam had always known that. It was the choice he made when he walked out of that room that fourth night in Rufus’ cabin.

Sam spotted Liv’s clothes at the foot of the bed, snatched them up, and leaned across the bed to hand them to her. She took them from him over her shoulder, without turning around and threw her shirt over her head, trying to piece herself back together.

“Sam,” she said to the opposite wall, voice shaking. _“Did you?”_

“Liv-”

_“Did you love her!”_

“Why does it matter?” he half whimpered.

“ _Because!_ ” she screamed, turning to him in fury. “You _left_ me, you avoided me for a year, you gave me no explanation until right now, this night --which was that you felt you being _around_ me put me in danger-- only to move in with another woman you only just met a few months ago! It matters!” Sam had never seen her like this. Liv was pretty sure she had never been like this. She didn’t care. She couldn’t have stopped herself even if she had cared.

“I .. I honestly don’t know if I loved her,” he replied, weakly. “We were both complete messes and she barely knew anything real about me, but it worked for what we had been through and what we could handle at the time. I cared about her. A lot.”

Liv charged the bed, slamming her hands on the mattress in front of Sam. He didn’t flinch away. He knew she wouldn’t hit him but he wished she would. He almost leaned into it. It would be easier to deal with than watching the pain he put on her face.  

“What was different with her?” she yelled. “You didn’t think your curse followed you to this new girl? Or ..?” Liv choked down the rest of that question. She didn’t actually want to know if the difference was that Amelia made him happy and that Liv did not.

Sam stared up into her wide eyes, full of pain and wanted to explain that it wasn’t like that at all. That when he finally returned to the land of the living --after months of isolating himself, grieving alone with a drink in his hand, after the nightmares finally became something that only happened once every few weeks instead of every time he fell asleep--  he saw clearly enough to realize that maybe he could be well again. Maybe he could actually exist even though the world no longer contained Dean. _Wouldn’t Dean want that?_ he had thought. Isn’t that what their agreement had been based on?

 _Of course, Dean hadn’t wanted that._ Sam had been wrong.

But maybe the dreams weren’t premonitions but just his own fears and guilt torturing him; it wouldn’t be the first time, afterall. But by the time he felt kind of alive again with a clearer head and slightly less fear that he possessed the touch of death, it had been so long since he left that note for Liv and driven away from the cabin that he wasn’t sure what to do next. He wanted to see her, but he couldn’t bring himself to disrupt her life. If he called her up out of the blue it would have made things worse, wouldn’t it? To just pop in and out of her life. He had picked the phone up many times only to never press send. _I will not haunt her,_ he had thought. Wasn’t it kinder to let her go? To allow her to let the man who ran out on her remain just a painful memory? He had stayed away from her because he thought his presence would cause her more pain.

 _Clearly, wrong about that, too._ It seemed to Sam he truly could not get one thing right.

It wasn’t that he preferred to be with Amelia. It was that he had closed Liv off as an option. Watching the tears spill out of Liv’s eyes, he wanted to explain that it wasn’t what it looked like, that Amelia was special to him but she was a life raft, much like Sam had been for her. They were both limping through life, learning how to be alive again without the people they valued most, and the other was a crutch. Amelia could never be what Liv was to him.

But the guilt Sam was drowning in wouldn’t allow him to tell her these things. Instead he stared at her as the silence between them seemed to crush him.

 _You don’t deserve excuses,_ the voice in his head growled. _You don’t get to explain yourself._ The pain he had caused Liv and Dean was all that mattered. The reasons why didn’t. He deserved to be punished, didn’t he? Sam always knew the answer to that question was yes.

 _But what does Liv deserve?_ Better than this. _Don’t fuck this up again._

Sam opened his mouth as if to finally answer, but Liv was already pushing away from the bed with a muffled cry. She stormed around the bed and headed for the bathroom, still slightly off balance as she went. He kept her in his vision, craning his neck to follow her around the room, until she slammed the bathroom door.

As soon as the door shut behind her, Liv fell to her knees over the toilet. She had held off an anxiety attack as long as she could, and so came the dry heaving, numbness, and shaking. She retched a few times, then fell back against the wall, bracing herself as best she could against the tremors throughout her body she had no control over. She focused on deep breaths and made sure she could easily reach the toilet if she felt nauseated again. To Liv, this went on for days, but really it was only about fifteen minutes in all. As her vision cleared, the room slowed to a stop, and the sensation returned back to her arms, she rested there on the floor, staring at the hotel bathroom rug beneath her. She shifted her legs away from it so her skin touched the cool tile.

As she listened to the hum of the bathroom vent fan, her nerves felt a little more stable, her mind clearer, her body relaxed (or was that just exhaustion?). She enjoyed deep breaths that came more and more easily each time she took one. She peered up at the lock on the door and felt a wave of gratitude. Having a second to be locked away, secluded and completely alone, was somehow making her feel a little better. It was just what she needed in order to regroup.

Liv pulled herself up onto her feet, leaning against the counter next to the sink. She dreaded looking at herself in the mirror but she did it anyways. Her pitiful reflection might have made her burst out laughing had she been in a better mood. Her hair was a tousled mess and she had cried most of her make-up off. There weren’t even any mascara stains. Just a complete lack of it anywhere on her face, even though she had applied it earlier that morning. She threw some water on her face and tried to smooth her hair back.

 _Now what?_ she thought as she stared herself down.

Now what, indeed. She was pretty sure she couldn’t stay in the bathroom of this hotel room forever, however tempting it was. Her immediate desire was to leave the hotel altogether. The bathroom door was right next to the room door, so she could slip out and not even have to face or explain herself to Sam. She knew he’d understand if she chose to go that way, anyways, another thing about him that was really helpful and sweet, but as things were between them it just made Liv roll her eyes.

 _Fucking, sensitive, understanding asshole._ It was proving impossible for her to feel completely mad at him no matter the circumstances, which made her more mad, of course.

If Liv was completely honest with herself, what she really wanted was to stay. Against her better judgment, against the pain in her chest, against probably what she considered the healthier choice, against what many would call ‘logic,’ Liv didn’t want to leave Sam ever again, regardless of anything. She had lost herself in the Winchesters, then she had lost the Winchesters. Now she somehow found them again --one was even back from the dead-- and although they were busted, jumbled, in complete disarray, and doing things that _hurt_ , could she really choose to walk away from them after the year she experienced without them?

What exactly had she expected to come of this situation? Did she ever actually expect to find Sam again? And if she had, did she expect him to be the same man she knew before she lost him, after everything he had been through? Did she expect he had just stopped living altogether while they were apart? And what about Dean? He was dead, now he’s not. How many people get a second chance to that degree?

 _And if I leave,_ she thought bitterly, _Dean wins._ A flare of disgust flickered in her chest at remembering why she had been brought here in the first place.

She stared herself down for one more moment before she unlocked the bathroom door and strode back into the hotel room. Sam seemed slightly startled at her sudden entrance, hopping up off the bed to stand awkwardly in front of her. For a moment he looked like he didn’t know what to say, but then words leapt out of his mouth like he was afraid he was about to lose the ability to speak.

“Look,” he began. “I know how all of this must seem and that you’re feeling hurt and.. I know I caused-- that I made everything worse for you. Whether I thought I was protecting you by leaving or staying away or --I don’t know-- whatever else I did that hurt you, it was the wrong call. I wasted a year of your life--”

“Sam--”

“I _did_. And you deserve better than that. It doesn’t matter what I meant to happen, it matters what did. I just, I’m so sorry, Liv.” He paused, pulling his eyebrows together. His genuine face burned her eyes like she was staring into the sun. “After tonight...and everything, you probably need to go. I totally understand and I can walk you to your car or --not. Whatever you need, just,” --he closed his eyes and shook his head like he was trying to squash out a buzzing noise from his ear or something-- “please don’t go thinking you ever stopped being incredibly important to me.” His eyes pleaded with her. “ _Please_.”

 _Goddammit, Sam._ “I’m not going anywhere,” she said, flatly.

Sam seemed slightly stunned. “You don’t have to--”

“I know. I know I don’t have to stay… and I probably _shouldn’t_ ,” --she smiled ironically at the thought that Dean would return and see his plan hadn’t worked out like he had hoped. There would be Liv, sticking with them through thick and thin, through bad break ups and screaming matches and everything in between. _Whoops_.-- “but this is what I want.”

“Are you sure?” Relief was painted all over him.

“Yes,” she said without hesitation. After saying it out loud, she knew she had no doubt. Heartache would continue to sting her chest and there was no way around that, the thought of Sam and a woman named Amelia whom she had never seen would haunt her thoughts for months to come, and Liv felt like she may never fully understand what the last year was about or why it happened the way it did, but she did know one thing: none of this was as painful as the thought of losing Sam and Dean again.

The last year had changed them but it had changed her, too. She didn’t need things to be the same to still need to be near Sam. She didn’t have to be dating Sam to love him. She didn’t have to be in a relationship with him to know _she mattered to him_. The Winchesters were like a current that had taken her over, and without a thought, she let herself get swept away, but now she was making a choice. This time she would make it deliberate. This time it wouldn’t be about getting lost but about finding herself alongside of them.  

“I love you. And I love your stupid brother. You hurt those you love, you try to move through it.” She paused, taking in a deep breath with a nod. “We’ll find a way through this.”

Sam nodded with conviction in return. “We will.”

“It’s nearly 4 AM and my car is across town and I’m fairly certain Dean took the Impala wherever he stormed off to, so you wanna go for a walk?”

From Sam’s most earnest expression, an inadvertent laugh escaped his mouth. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

 

 


End file.
